Surrey County Council’s Executive plans to reduce funding by £80,000 year on year, of which £45,000 would be funded by the Surrey Drug Action Team, giving a reduction in real terms of £35,000.

Margaret Hicks, county councillor for Hersham and a member of the children and young people select committee, told the News & Mail:

“We on the select committee thought we should be looking to be supporting education as much as we can rather than reducing it. We cannot live the lives of young people for them but we must give them as much education as possible on growing up these days.

“Anything that we can put in place to inform young people of the dangers of drugs and alcohol is important. To my mind, you have got to give them as much help as you can.

“No one knows of the consequences of drug or alcohol abuse in later life, when people reach 60 or 70.

“Will people reach that age? Will there be mental or health problems? We have got to protect the young people.”

Brian Kingston, former Elmbridge’s youth affairs officer at Surrey Police, was responsible for the introduction of the RIDE (Resistance-In Drugs Education) programme into the majority of the borough’s schools.

“It is not a problem that is going to go away and the resources need to be maintained,” he said. “Young people need to be dissuaded because drugs and alcohol can have some dramatically life changing effects.

“The vast majority of young people don’t have problems, but those that do need to be aware of the consequences.

“They both need to be given equal priority and that needs to be through education and enforcement.”

“Drug and alcohol education is people just going into schools and teaching kids about drugs,” he said. “It is a very ineffective way to teach people about it and it seems to be more about pleasing the parents of these children than anything.

“If they are placing the money into a more appropriate scheme then that is an approach that would be more than welcome. I just don’t think that drug education in schools is very effective at the moment.”

Mr Blakeborough said that it would be better if the money was spent on improving counselling in schools. “It is difficult to actually understand kids who are vulnerable to drugs misuse,” he said. “One of the classic examples is people who have been bullied.

“It is all about having good counselling services in schools because drug and alcohol education will mean nothing to them. We have more drug users now than we have ever had and drug education has been increasing over the last 10 years so what does that say?

“It is better to put money into school counsellors generally because that is much more important.”